This Thanksgiving will mark the 8th post-divorce holiday feast dedicated to gratitude, family, and tradition that I have celebrated with my ex-wife/coparent and our son. This year, we will be celebrating in Southern California. In previous years, we have enjoyed the holiday in Mexico, Canada, England, and elsewhere. Particularly relevant this year, we will spend the day with our son’s older cousin, a smart and caring young woman who herself married just last year. In my wedding to her aunt over a decade and a half ago, she served as our flower girl. In her wedding, our son served as her ring bearer. Now, she and her husband are expecting their own child, who is due in the same month our son was born.

Almost none of my clients spend holidays with their ex-spouse and their ex-spouse’s family. The formal distance and separation works for them because a chapter has definitively closed for them in almost every meaningful way. I am glad that at this point in their lives these clients can create and curate a holiday experience for themselves and their kids. I am also glad that I have been able, working collaboratively with my ex-wife, to also fashion a holiday routine (and a daily one as well) that works for us. Some people look at divorce and are thankful for the proverbial “fresh start.” After years spent in an often-contentious marriage that was rife with bitten tongues and bruised feelings, the brave new world of life after marriage presents a kind of new frontier for them to reinvent themselves.

For others who choose it, there can be a no less bold, rewarding, and daunting territory to navigate. To understand that world one must first appreciate what it is and is not. The world of divorce is often depicted as a kind of terra incognita that begins from the entry of the divorce judgment as an inevitable, total, and irreversible point of departure. In law we refer to divorce as the dissolving or dissolution of a marriage. Colloquially, we refer to divorced homes as “broken” homes. Divorce, then, is always and already laden with the concept of breaking, ending, departing, and distancing.

But does divorce necessarily entail all those things? In some ways, yes, or it wouldn’t be a divorce. In many other ways, the answer is not necessarily. For everything that divorce ends, that ending opens a terrain to reimagined ways of living and interacting. Rather than a one-size-fits-all option, divorce allows spouses (particularly with younger children) to thoughtfully press the reset button. Spouses can choose a bespoke approach to post-divorce life. They can elect to maintain all or only certain traditions, they can agree to particularized living arrangements, they can maintain agreed-upon financial entanglements and joint ventures, and they can establish schedules that work for their children AND for them. While the canvas is not blank by any means, it is double sided and in divorce it can be turned over for a new creation to be made from what preceded it. In this way, the raw material of what worked can be salvaged and repurposed to new ends.

As I write this, my iPhone just updated to iOS 16. In many ways it is similar to the multiple earlier versions of the Apple operating system that powered my phone. My same physical phone can now do things it could not before, and it does so in a manner that looks different on the surface but is still wholly familiar. That’s an apt metaphor for marriage and divorce. In my own life, for the past eight years, my coparent and I have worked together on attempting to program a new operating system for ourselves and our son. In panoply ways, that system has components erected and refined during the time we were married. In other ways, we have added, deleted, and revised things along the way. Ultimately, though, we are still a family, together although apart. As we prepare to celebrate the holiday once again, I am thankful that out of the inevitable closing and disruption that divorce brought to our lives as a married couple, we nonetheless preserved the pieces of that relationship that worked and oriented our post-divorce commitments and efforts to finding a new way forward the biggest shared interest we have—our son, and his well-being.

Brendan Hammer can be reached at [email protected] or 312. 372.6058. His website is www.hammer.llc.